Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (29 July 1805-16 April 1859) was a French politician who served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Manche from 7 March 1839 to 23 April 1848, a member of the National Assembly for Manche from 25 April 1848 to 3 December 1851, and Foreign Minister from 2 June 1849 to 30 October 1849 (succeeding Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys and preceding Alphonse de Rayneval). He was most famous for his work Democracy in America, which was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

Biography
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris, First French Empire on 29 July 1805 to an old Norman aristocratic family. Tocqueville despised the July Monarchy, but he was skeptical of the extremes of democracy, and he was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government and abolitionism. In 1831, he was sent to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States, and, while he did visit some prisons, he traveled widely in the USA and wrote about his observations and reflections. He returned to France within nine months and published a report, and he published the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835. In 1835, he also visited famine-stricken Ireland, and he visited Algeria in 1841 and 1846, where he supported the racial segregation of French and Arabs in opposition to France's assimilationist policies.

In 1848, following the February Revolution, Tocqueville was made a member of the Constituent Assembly, and he supported a bicameral parliamentary government and the election of the President by universal suffrage. He believed that, due to the conservatism of the countryside, universal suffrage could counteract the revolutionary spirit on Paris. During the French Second Republic, he opposed the socialists, and he supported Louis-Eugene Cavaignac's suppression of the June Days uprising.

In 1849, he entered Odilon Barrot's government as Foreign Minister, and he voted to restrict the liberty of clubs and the freedom of the press in the immediate aftermath of the June Days riots. He also supported Cavaignac against Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1848 presidential election, and he was briefly detained at Vincennes after Napoleon's seizure of power in 1851. He came to support the restoration of the Bourbons against Napoleon's Second French Empire, and he quit political life and retreated to the Chateau de Tocqueville. He died of tuberculosis in Cannes in 1859 at the age of 53.